Like a tracer bullet

Origin of: Like a tracer bullet

Like a tracer bullet

A simile for great speed or extremely fast and dates from the early 20th century. The tracer bullet is a British invention from WWI and was introduced into Lee Enfield ‘303 ammunition in 1915. Essentially a tracer bullet contains some incendiary material, like magnesium, strontium etc, in its base, which ignites when the bullet is fired. Typically, every fourth or fifth bullet would be a tracer, which enables the shooter to gauge where his bullets are going, though not with total accuracy, because early tracer bullets tended to lose some momentum because of the incendiary material they contained. Tracer bullets also revealed the location of the shooter, which was not always wise. Modern armies these days use LED technology for tracer ammunition, which can only be seen from the shooter’s position.